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June 9, 2006

Girls with toys

Women in TechnologyWomen in IT, eh? Not many, are there? It's enough to make you think there's a conspiracy going on. However, the more mundane reality is that most girls of school-leaving age just don't find a career in servers, switches and front-end buses particularly attractive. Can't think why. But the irony is, and oh what an irony, IT jobs today are increasingly crying out for the kind of "soft skills" that women apparently excel at. Which I personally find quite offensive; it implies that most men in IT are social misfits unable to interact with anything with a pulse. As if.

And as for resources for those women who ignored their peers and took the plunge into techie-land... I saw an advert pasted to the side of a London bus the other day, hoping to alert people to a newish web portal called Women in Technology. This site features job listings and careers advice and lots of pictures of odd looking women with fixed grins. Good effort on the advertising front, but a six foot poster of a pretty young girl posing with a laptop on her, erm, lap is perhaps not the best way to advertise you wares for this kind of thing. I don’t know how many casual observers would be interested in it but some more targeted advertising would better fit the bill I reckon - perhaps in the IT press, say?

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